Introduction

Throughout this short course, we will be using the measurement and estimation of “social trust” as a guiding example. However, the aim is to help you build up your skills and confidence in asking and addressing research questions of your own, and the assessment questions will ask you to analyse some other chosen research topic.

Exercise 4: Begin your analysis for Assignment 1!

Below are some research questions that you can choose from to address in Assignment 1:

  1. Are religious people more satisfied with life?
  2. Are older people more likely to see the death penalty as justifiable?
  3. What factors are associated with opinions about future European Union enlargement among Europeans?
  4. Is higher internet use associated with stronger anti-immigrant sentiments?
  5. How does victimisation relate to trust in the police?
  6. What factors are associated with belief in life after death?
  7. Are government/public sector employees more inclined to perceive higher levels of corruption than those working in the private sector?

For now, choose one question that you find most sympathetic (you don’t need to stick with it for the assignment, but you could if you wanted to!). All of the questions can be answered with at least one of the survey datasets that you downloaded (the “WVS7” or “ESS10”) and often they both contain relevant variables.

  1. Identify your “explanandum” - i.e. the core phenomenon/concept/behaviour/etc. that the research question aims to explain. The questions all postulate a relationship/association between two or more variables (the topic of the next workshop), but for now, think carefully about the question and how it is formulated, and identify which is the variable that will be the target of explanation, and which variable (if mentioned) will be used for explaining it. For example, in the research question “Does education increase social trust?”, the variable we are interested in explaining is “social trust”, while “education” is the variable that we will use to explain it. In later workshops we will develop better vocabulary to describe associations between variables.

  2. Once the core phenomenon to be explained is identified, look through the two survey questionnaires to identify any variables that might exist in the dataset that captures it. This may require some trial-and-error with testing out search words.

  3. Once you have found one (or several) candidate variable(s), navigate to the relevant survey website and select a single country for which to download data. You will be working with single-country datasets for your assignment. Download the dataset, import it into JASP, find the relevant variable and perform some descriptive analysis on the chosen variable as you have done in the previous exercise.

  4. Make sure to add your noted and interpretations on the analysis results and save your analysis for later. You could create a new sub-folder for your “Assignment 1” work and save your analysis there for future use. If you end up liking your chosen question, you can continue this analysis in the next workshop.